Sheep & Wolves
Who: Hanna Pulaski and NPC Max Keeler (written by Kate) Where: Provo, Utah When: Six months ago What: Public service homicide Rating: High, language and violence
She’d been sitting in the car for forty-five minutes.
3469 Sioux Circle was in one of those neighborhoods that had seen better days ten years ago. Maybe twenty. Cracked asphalt, small yards filled with crabgrass, houses close together. She’d done a dry run a week ago, checking for nosy neighbors, if the police frequented the area, if she’d be able to get in and out without being noticed.
Can you do this?
The voice was coolly inquiring, and Hanna couldn’t decide if it was someone she knew or some weird shadow self she’d tapped into. In group they called it disassociation, even a fugue state, but this was neither of those. She was as clear as a bell.
Can you do this? Because if you can’t, you might as well go back to Chicago and Joe’s basement. Those are your only choices.
The door of the Honda opened, and her boots hit the tarmac with a quiet thump. She’d chosen the weak link to start out with, what should be the easy one. If Keeler didn’t know where his buddies were, he’d have something in the house that could tell her.
Moths were flitting around the porch light as she gained the landing, wings fluttering in the night air. Hanna looked over her shoulder at the street, stuck her hand into her jacket pocket. Knocked on the wooden door with the other.
A large-breed dog started barking. If Hanna listened close, she could hear its untrimmed nails scraping down the inside of the front door and tapping on the tile floor of the entranceway. A male voice called out, “Shut up!” Footsteps bounded from a living room, where a sectional couch hemmed in a slider that looked out over the steep hill of the backyard. The flat screen television was playing a football game. “Get back!”
There was a break in the noise as Max looked out the peephole, no sound but the metallic clang of a flagpole in the small front yard, then the turn of a deadbolt and a twisting knob. The door nudged open a crack. Max peered out. “Yeah?”
“Max Keeler?”
Both to be absolutely sure and to make certain he was alone. What she could see of him said he was about her height and in his late thirties, though she couldn’t really get a look at him through the mid-sized gap. She could hear the dog behind him. Between the two of them, she’d rather not hurt the dog.
“Trevor sent me, said I could crash with you for a couple of nights. He’s supposed to come through on his way somewhere else, he’s gonna pick me up later.”
Hanna shifted towards the opening, letting him see more of her. If she was right, the urge to jump at the mention of one of his leaders would override Max’s common sense about not letting strangers in. If not, she could always embroider the lie.
Max frowned, thinking, ‘I didn’t get any texts.’ He idly scratched at his neck with an index finger. The werewolf’s disbelief was based less on self-preservation than the fact that nobody mentioned closing the deal on a good-looking woman, and it seemed like the kind of thing they might talk about. He felt behind himself for his phone, which was stuffed in the hip pocket of his jeans. Out of sight, Max pretended to consult it. While he stared at the lock screen, the gears cranked to rusty life in his head. The last thing he wanted was to look like he was out of the loop, like he didn’t have the standing in the pack to decide who crashed on his own couch and ate his food.
“Oh yeah.” He raised his chin, a jerky nod of acquiescence. “Yeah I think he might’ve mentioned it.” The dog was back to dancing at his side. Max opened his palm and let the dog sniff and lick his fingers.
Max grabbed the dog by the collar so he wouldn’t run out and opened the door.
Moron.
Hanna stepped through the widened opening and got a better look at both occupants of the house, that the door had a deadbolt. Good. She waited until he re-engaged it while eyeing the dog, weighed the odds against an attack. Fifty fifty, more in her favor if he hit the animal sometimes. Which would fit.
She stepped up into him while he was still half-turned, took the punch dagger out of her pocket and stabbed him twice. Just under his ribs, close to his kidneys. Then a third time, near his armpit. The silver blade had a black hilt, had been given to her via a pair of salad tongs. She couldn’t survive a pitched battle if he changed, but his vulnerability to the weapon gave her an advantage.
“You’re a bad dog, Max.”
The pain was a sharp jab at first, then like a searing firebrand into his body. He didn’t have time to react to the first before the second knifing came. Max hollered. “Ah, what the fuck!” Adrenaline made him jump to break contact with the sensation, but there wasn’t anywhere to go but straight into the front door and the right-angle corner it made with the wall, bouncing into the narrow confines of it. There was an excruciating slice of agony near his armpit, and he turned around and lashed out at the brunette, a wild swing of his right arm.
The dog yelped and barked. There was a low growl, not from the canine but Max as his shoulders bunched up. He was one of the least experienced wolves in an aggressive pack. His immediate reaction to that kind of attack wasn’t fear but anger, the kind of seeing-red mentality that made his heart beat fast and his mind sloppy and weak. The wolf began to claw at the surface, every bit as mean as its host, but its capacity to break free from its human cage drained out of Max Keeler as fast as the blood dripped down his torso to soak his shirt and pants. A wave of weakness crashed through him. His legs buckled as he tipped toward Hanna.
“That silver’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
She caught him as he pitched in her direction, and with an effort hauled him further into the house to dump him on the couch, leaving a blood trail on the uncarpeted floor. The dog was whining, a high-pitched noise in response to his owner’s groans of pain, and Hanna got him by the collar and herded him almost gently into the bathroom in the hall. Closed the door with a quiet click, then went back into the living room.
“You still awake?”
The question was conversational while she looked for the remote, and she found it under a pile of fast food wrappers. Shut the game off, because she wanted some quiet. Max was slouched on the sofa, his shirt already stained red, his pants following suit.
“If you’re wondering why you’re not dead, don’t.” She took up space in the easy chair across from the couch, the cluttered coffee table between them. “Let’s talk about your friends, Max.”
The pain was disorienting. It made him ripe with stress sweat. The knife might be gone, but the wounds festered in his back and side. Max’s feet dug into the floor as he wriggled against the cushions, trying to get himself upright. “What friends?”
One of his arms chicken-winged, the fingers groping for the only entry-wound he could reach. Max didn’t know what he expected to find, but the ragged tear of shirt and flesh felt, superficially, like an ordinary injury. What the fuck had she done to him? When he’d pictured taking silver -- and he had, because he’d witnessed it being done to a wolf in his own pack -- he saw it as a bullet he couldn’t grasp. This was worse. There was nothing to dig out.
The woman’s face swam in his sightline. Max made himself focus on it. “Do I look like I got friends?”
“Now’s not the time to be brave. Though I suppose you wouldn’t know how.”
She studied him gravely while he prodded at the wound in his side, and fuck but up close he was pathetic. But she knew what he was under that, even if she had no memory of it. There was a crimson smear on the leg of her jeans where she’d wiped the blade off.
“Trevor. Zack. Simon. Wyatt. Patrick.”
The tip of the dagger tapped a rhythm on the corner of the coffee table as Hanna intoned the names, and if he balked she was going to cut something off. A finger, maybe. At the least, she’d stab him again. She had the feeling Keeler wanted to live, and at some point hurting him would become counterproductive. And maybe she was a little insulted that he didn’t know who she was, but why would he?
“You jumped quick enough when I said your buddy Trevor sent me to wait for him, so we’ll start there. Where’s he hanging his hat lately?”
Max watched her tap that knife. He strained, half in pain, half trying to release the wolf so he could rip her throat out and watch her bleed out on the area rug. The hair on his arms bristled and he felt his bones briefly slide in their joints, the snap audible, but nothing else happened. He panted, “I ain’t tellin you shit. I don’t know who you are!” He assessed his options for nearest weapons: a beer bottle, the hard, sharp base of the lamp, the coffee table.
If she was gunning for his pack, there was nothing to gain from ratting them all out. Maybe one or two ahead of him in the pecking order, not all, but it’d be hard to hide these knife wounds when the pack closed ranks. It could be that the Alpha sent her to test his mettle. If he failed, there was nothing this bitch could do that compared.
In the bathroom, the dog whined and barked.
“That’s fine. That’s just fine.”
Her voice was very soft, and she pushed out of the chair with the hand not holding the knife, using the momentum as leverage as she pushed the weapon up to the hilt in his thigh. His aborted attempt at changing meant she’d already hurt him, and her weight bore down before she got her free hand on the back of the couch. For the push off, and the dagger came free with a squelching sound. At close range, Keeler smelled like sweat and impotent rage.
“Now. Let’s try that again.”
He wasn’t brave, Hanna decided, but he was more afraid of his wolf buddies than he was of her. She’d have to change that. And she was the only one here.
Through a haze, Max saw the silver blade descend. “No--!” He tried to move, but Hanna was too fast. The groan of pain through his gritted molars was a guttural sound. Max’s face reddened and a line of drool slipped out of his mouth, making his chin wet. It was natural for his hands to flutter to the space the knife occupied, to try to get the weapon, but she retracted it before he could grab it. It sliced a thin line up one of Max’s fingers.
Up close to her on the couch, his memory finally tripped. Max didn’t know if he’d seen Pulaski’s face in the woods, or later on the news, but he remembered her. This wasn’t a test from his Alpha. She was the soldier up in the tree! The one his pack hadn’t ripped to pieces. Did she know what it was for? Was that why she started with him?
Suddenly he knew that he wasn’t likely to get out of this alive, not unless he gave her a good reason. Panic overtook him. There was just enough strength left in Max’s body to give the wolf a late burst of adrenaline. He came off the cushions and snatched up a handful of brown hair, using her body as leverage to lift himself up. Max’s mouth gnashed at whatever skin he could reach. He tasted salt and tried to clamp down. Even human teeth could break the skin if they bit down hard enough.
If he hadn’t bitten her, she might have made an exception, let him live. Might have. It was like with the dog, she didn’t want to kill anybody or anything.
But it triggered something, one of the buried memories she’d walled off in her subconscious so she could keep from putting a gun in her mouth. She could hear Butch Pritchard screaming as he was eviscerated, the sounds of shots dwindling into the noise of the downpour. How cold she’d been.
“You rectangular asshole.”
Her voice shook as she punched him in the throat, a mostly ineffectual blow because of the angle, but she still hit his windpipe as she wrenched her arm away from his face. Out of his mouth. She inspected the skin for teeth marks, for blood. Unbroken flesh made her breath slow a little, but her heart rate had tripled. He’d tried to bite her, make her like him.
“Where. Are. They. Because we understand each other now, don’t we?”
Hanna pointed the dagger between Keeler’s legs, and she might cut them off anyway. Slice off his balls and stuff them in his biting mouth. So he could choke on them in hell.
Max collapsed in a coughing spasm. He groped his throat until he could breathe and talk, his eyes streaming fluid. The werewolf watched her inspecting her arm as he settled back down. The frantic way she searched it for broken flesh. In spite of the dire straits he was in, he smiled, a little satisfied at making her sweat, a little nostalgic. “I remember... what that was like,” he rasped. “That feeling.” Loss of blood was catching up to him. He looked at the wall behind her, up to the ceiling, anywhere but between his legs.
His pack had specialized in recruiting ‘mean’. People from the fringes. Occasionally they didn’t ask for volunteers. Trevor had bitten Max in the parking lot of a bar, after a dispute over money turned violent. After that, hazing, fights, laughter, it was all a matter of survival in the pack, seeing which wolf could out-cruel the next. For Max, still at the tail end of the line, there was no love lost between him and the wolf that bit him, especially now that it was pointless to cover his ass.
“Geneva Road,” he said, shrugging. “Trevor.”
Get your shit together, Pulaski.
A snapped-out command, and it sounded like her CO in Basic, the one who’d yelled commands for most of those ten weeks. Hanna clamped down hard on the tremor in her hand, her teeth clenching so much a muscle in her cheek jumped. She let out a breath, pulled another in. Let it out.
“Geneva Road. Trevor.”
Echoing him, and she patted Keeler’s cheek with her free hand. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
She cut his throat with one clean stroke, and she was going to have to get a different weapon, one to give her some distance. He’d almost fucking bitten her because she was too focused on going for the hurt. She couldn’t afford to make that mistake again.
Hanna watched him bleed out, and the smell of it was everywhere. In the bathroom, the dog had started to bark again, and she wiped the dagger off on the arm of the couch. Decided not to cut his balls off post mortem. It made her sick just to look at him. But bad dogs did have to be put to sleep.
She washed her hands at the kitchen sink, could feel the last of the jitters subsiding. Used up a good bit of dish soap to get all the blood off. The first one would be the worst, she’d been told that. She didn’t know if she wanted it to get easier or not.
Some further investigation led her to find a half-full bag of kibble, a plastic container of rawhide chews, and a dog leash. Hanna packed the items into a small cardboard box from the pantry and carried it outside to the car, then looped the leash over her left hand and went back inside. The dog was scratching at the inside of the bathroom door as if he meant to tunnel through it at any moment. Because good dogs deserved to be saved.